Prison for three lawyers of opponent Navalny

Three lawyers of Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny, who died in prison almost a year ago, were sentenced Friday in Russia to prison terms for extremism, according to AFP journalists present in court.

Russia is engaged in a campaign of repression of critics of Vladimir Putin, particularly those close to Navalny and those denouncing the Russian assault on Ukraine, launched almost three years ago.

The lawyers Alexeï Liptser, sentenced to 5 years of detention, Igor Sergunin, sentenced to 3 and a half years, and Vadim Kobzev, sentenced to 5 and a half years, were arrested in October 2023, when the number one opponent of the Russian president was still alive. They had been accused of participation in the deceased’s organization, considered extremist by Russia.

They are accused of having transmitted to Alexeï Navalny, imprisoned in Russia from January 2021 until his death in prison on February 16, 2024, information allowing him to “plan, prepare and commit extremist crimes” from his cell, according to investigators. These charges are punishable by six years in detention and the prosecution had requested sentences of more than five years.

Exiled Russian opponent Yulia Navalnaïa called on Friday to “immediately” release her late husband’s lawyers, a few hours after their conviction. Lawyers Alexei Liptser, Igor Sergunin and Vadim Kobzev “are political prisoners and must be released immediately,” she wrote on X, almost a year after the death of the famous opponent in a Russian prison.

The trial has been taking place since mid-September before a court in Petushki, in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, where one of the prisons where Alexei Navalny was once incarcerated is also located. After the start of the first hearing on September 12, all the debates took place behind closed doors, at the request of the prosecutor, despite protests from defense lawyers. According to a court statement, Igor Sergunin pleaded guilty, unlike Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev.

According to one of the defense lawyers, Roman Karpinski, the case was based on wiretapping of Navalny’s meetings with his lawyers during his detention, which according to him constitutes a “violation of professional secrecy” of the prison administration, who transmitted these recordings to investigators.

“We are being tried for having transmitted Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” one of the accused, lawyer Vadim Kobzev, denounced in court at the end of December, quoted by Novaya Gazeta. The NGO Amnesty International had urged Moscow to put an end to “arbitrary prosecutions” against the lawyers.

Since the start of the assault on Ukraine in February 2022, repression has hit all dissident voices in Russia. Lawyers for opposition activists were once rarely imprisoned, although subject to increasing surveillance and threats. Over the past three years, several of them have fled their country to escape prison.

Two other former lawyers of Alexeï Navalny, Olga Mikhaïlova and Alexandre Fedoulov, are thus abroad and targeted by an arrest warrant from the Russian authorities.

Charismatic anti-corruption activist, Alexeï Navalny was arrested in Moscow in January 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was hospitalized after being the victim of a poisoning in Siberia which he blamed on the Kremlin, which has always denied it. He was then sentenced to several heavy sentences, including 19 years in prison in August 2023 for “extremism”.

Navalny communicated on social networks mainly via messages sent to his lawyers, in which he notably denounced the offensive in Ukraine and called on the Russians to “resist”. His organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) has been classified as “extremist” in Russia since 2021. The circumstances of his death in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024 remain unclear.

Many of his former collaborators, refugees abroad, now work with his widow, Yulia Navalnaïa, who took up the torch of her husband’s movement in exile, without however succeeding in uniting a divided and scattered opposition abroad.